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tv   Press Here  NBC  February 3, 2013 9:00am-9:30am PST

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shameful act. you need to consider the conferences. you have essentially turned traitor. you've broken what everyone knows is the contract that you make when you start working at a company, when you're there forever. you've changed the rules of the game and you're never going to live that down. it looks easy nowadays, because we have a tradition largely set in motion by those guys where it's accepted in this town. you're better off to go out and start your own company and fail than it is to stick it one company for 30 years. the real respect comes from going out there and being an entrepreneur. but that wasn't true in the 1950s. the cost of ail fuhr now is small. the cost of failure back then was enormous. must have been scary as hell. >> randall maclowrey is a mim maker, his new film "silicon valley" premieres.
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jon schwartz of u.s. "today." why silicon valley? why our part of town? >> i was actually very fortunate to have been given the opportunity by american experience. >> all right. why were they interested? they were -- the sloan foundation is one of their founders. they were really very, have interested in bringing the story "silicon valley" to the public. silicon valley, the revolution that hand here and created by these men, in terms of takingojs into the digital age, the information age really changed our lives in the way we interact today. people take for granted things like cell phones, computers and laptops. all of these thins sort of stand back to what these guys invented. >> even the corporate culture, right? i thought that was one of the
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interesting aspects, how they set the corporate culture at least here in silicon valley we take for granted today. >> certainly. the main character in this was instrumental, helping to bring the new idea to the democratic -- >> wearing junes. >> cubicals, everybody thinks with intel, you look at facebook, it's a very open environment where really the effort is to reward people for their ideas and to try to create and to inspire innovation. >> and this happened in the mid '50s. not just tech but any industry. to jump from a long-established company that you work for into something that didn't exist. >> i mean, this is a radical act for them to do that. it really wasn't done at the time. today, start-ups happen all of the time, getting venture capital for it. back then, to leave the job, that at the time was considered a good job -- >> so my dad, just personal information. my dad used to work at ibm for
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20 years. they had a philosophy there. he left in the '70s. it was considered suicide to work at a start-up. that attitude persisted for decades. >> i think some. some of the people we interviewed, he talked about his father, he was stunned, thinking that he was thinking of starting his own company. at that time, you had a good job with the phone company. you stayed there for life. you got your 30-year pin. that was the way it should be. to take that kind of risk it was something people department consider. >> i was going to ask. intel, actually, is known for -- a lost top executives have been there for 20, 30 year. do you think there's something, the founders early on was very innovative? it's a very innovative company. is there something they kind of maintained there in the culture
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that encourages people to spend most of their careers there? >> i think intel, that was a company that robert and gordon moore started in 1969. they started to doing things that were very common today. stock options. >> that he felt when he was with fairchild. they with controlled by the eastern company that basically owned fairchild that he couldn't reward his employees the way he wanted to, the way he felt they should be and to give stock options, he felt was a way to have his employees so much more invested in the company. i think that played a large part in the way they dealt with that. >> i was surprised. obviously, we know silicon valley fairly well. we know the organs. i was surprised to be reminded, i guess the best way to phrase it. how important defense was. that fairchild, most of their
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customers was the u.s. defense department. which makes sense. nobody was building computers in the defense department. but it did surprise me that the cold war was so important to the genesis of silicon valley. >> i think it's true. the spark was the defense department, something like sputnik was the real spark where it was the reason. the government needed to sort of have these devices that these individuals were about to create, these silicon transcripters that were smaller and lighter that they could put into rockets, missiles and planes. it was considered part of the national defense strategy and the government was willing to pay pretty much anything to get these devices. get the early companies like fairchild even off the ground. >> i was personally surprised there were no togo parties. i don't know if you've seen the slogan. >> you've read my mind. you're actually doing a public service after that.
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>> there would be a temptation. do a documentary about silicon valley. why not? why is it a black and white film about the early days of silicon valley and not one about, you know, the porsches that are handed out as option to new engineers. >> the goal for this is really sort of explore the roots of this place and i think, you know, people today, they know silicon valley and of course silicon valley is what people are trying to emulate. how do you bring that into a place. silicon valley seemed toh> correct. >> i wonder if you might give it the ken burns treatment where you might come back later if
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this goes well and have another that picks up from the '70s. >> you want to see ferraris. >> i do. i want the zuckerberg story. >> parties. >> i think there's plenty of stories to be told in sill can valley. whether american experience would want to move forward and do another one. it's always an issue, where you start to find history and where you look back on it and analyze it an so on. >> and it always comes down to funding, doesn't it? >> that doesn't change. randall mac lowry, it premieres tuesday evenings. >> that's right. >> thank you so much. >> facebook was pummeled after ostensibly good news. investors can't get rid of apple share fast enough. when did investors start looking at that? we'll have that when
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"press:here" conditions.
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welcome back to "press:here." let's talk tech stocks for a minute. apple lost more thanks to tafrping stock and what does that say for hp? last week facebook announcedsp) made more money than expected jon schwartz in "usa today" called the earnings foffo and investors dumped the stock nonetheless. robert hendershott is a science professor is here to find out what is wrong with jon swartz? >> they are mobile, 23% income up from 3%.
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>> everybody criticized facebook for not having no mobile strategies. >> explain it to us, professor. >> the way it works, people make two mistakes. one they confuse good products with good companies and good stocks and the second is when we look at what happens, we focus too much on this little quarterly, oh, did they beat the numbers, when, what we're really, should be focused on is how much did they surprise us about the long run. facebook didn't announce anything that was different than what people expected them to do for the long run. >> because the stock price reflects what you anticipate will happen. >> in the long run. you know facebook stock has gone up a lot from its lows. people were already giving them a lot of credit. then after the announcement, they weren't surprise. they felt like they were giving them too much credit. >> there's some point they feel the opposite about apple. it's run its course. apple can say listen.
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look at all of the cell phones we've sold. we sold millions of cell phones. >> 48 million. >> same idea. investors clearly think that company. at least currently think that company has run its course. >> apple did a phenomenal job surprising people. first they surprised people with the ipod. nobody thought there was anything to do with mp3 players. turned out there was. then they surprised people with the iphone. then they surprised people with the ipad. when the iphone came out. people thought flip or not. that was the only decision you had to make. those were big surprises. apple tv has not surprised anyone. and now people are worried about what is apple going to do to surprise us. >> there's that long term, that's true, concern about what -- how innovative apple is going to be. then, again, wasn't there like $13 billion for -- >> that was my original point. i think as!!9u a ceo. if you don't understand exactly what the investors are thinking, what do i got to do, people?
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are you not entertained? >> they had a slightly better than second quarter and their stock skyrocketed. >> amazon was slightly worse and there's tanked in both cases looking at the long run. what happened in this quarter is relative to what people talked about. this is one quarter in a century that we're looking forward. what we want to focus on, in d netflix surprise us? are they creating a new market, streaming movies to mobile devices that people didn't think exists? is amazon becoming the leader in cloud computing, starting local delivery? things we didn't think they would do five years ago. >> you know what the other thing is. these companies have shorter shelf lives. they last seven, eight, nine, ten year. >> not necessarily. apple survived as a second-rate
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tech company despite having great technology. >> that can is the exception. that's a rarity. >> of course. all of them, even apple, they are like great white sharks. they are power houses. they are unstoppable until they stop and they got it. it can happen very quickly. investors worry about that every day. and, so, when facebook comes out with, oh, yeah, we're delivering ads to cell phones, that's not enough. what are you going to do that's going to be like google's ad sense? it creates a total different market that didn't exist before. it let us dominate the world. >> has it always been us? when you look back 100 years, people were investing in general electric and gerber baby food. whatever was around then. were the targets further out? >> the targets came more slowly. sale things did happen. look at auto industry in the early years.
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it's about who will bring out something that changes the way people use automobiles. it just department happen in months, quarters, years. it happened over decades. it was the same principle. it just -- everything accelerated now. particularly in technology. >> we'll leave it there. dr. robert hendershott. thanks for coming in and explaining what we did wrong. >> again. four rules, just four of them will make you a hit on youtube just like these guys, when stephen voltz, the diet coke and mentos guy joins us when "press:here" continues.
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welcome back to "press:here." by the time the super bowl gets under way you'll see most of the commercials, leaked from the internet so
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they will go viral. viral videos are part of the new age of marketing. red bull's so successful with this video, it created its own video production company. and this film, about war lord joseph kony has been seen by 96 million people, the most viral video ever. now, companies are desperate to create the next viral hit. and a new book, the viral video manifesto, promises to spill those secrets. its authors know the subject well. you already know them as the diet coke and mentos guy. stephen voltz is a lawyer working at both federal court and state court in his home state of massachusetts. he's, however, best known as that guy from youtube. i think i have to start with, how many times have you turned
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and said ladies and gentlemen of the jury. and that one guy go, i know -- i've been thinking for days who that guy is. and i just figured it out. has that happened? >> if has not happened. i closed my practice back in 2007. >> so you do not stand before jurors anymore. >> but there was a dicey time i was doing viral video and trying cases. and i had to break it to my clients. i was like how am i going to let me represent them. i'm a clown on the internet. >> did you see the viral video thing? >> we got on letterman, i can't keep it a see krecht and they were all remarkably good. i thought they could wo say you can't be my lawyer. they said that's good, that's fantastic. >> do net ever hire a viral video. incredible in front of a jury. i know you have question. the mentos guy, did you stumble into it? you dropped a mentos into a diet
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coke? >> we were getting ready for that. once we knew we wanted to do a video. we tried a combination of every soda. it was very scientific. i had bowls of different soda. i would drop a mentos -- >> i i want to go to that. hey, we should drop candy in soda thing. >> a small puppy in the -- >> it was out there in the corner of parlor tricks for year. we know a lot of circus type performers. that's sort of the community that we came out of. and one of my friends who was a performer did a showcase, where they do showcase for other school bookers and he had seen somebody do a science show where they dropped mentos in diet coke. he said have you heard about this crazy thing. you drop mentos into diet coke. i said no way. i was going up to my friends in maine, a really cool performing
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community. i brought some with me. he said you're right, this is going to be awesome. like everybody else, it was like, holy crap. and fritz, my performing partner said, we got a show tomorrow night. let's do something for the show. so we put together ten bottle little thing to see -- we found lab coats in the back of the theater. they're actually butcher coats from the general store next door. they were matching, hey, there's our costume tonight. if you look at our website. you can find it under early experiments. the audience reaction was so huge, we were like, tell nobody. we'll lock ourselves up. >> this was the biggest viral hit. have you done other viral things like that? >> that was all completely off the charts. everything we've done -- >> you have a couple examples. >> we found another coke and mentos one. it was a domino effect. you set up one, then eventually 250 across a big field.
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that was a google video when google video was a thing. that has some 8 million views. >> the car -- >> actually we shot david letterman on a coke and mentos powered car. >> i think you write about how being authentic matters so much, and you have this great example of disney setups. marriage proposal, and then the real one that just -- >> off the charts. absolutely. >> explain this to me. >> basically, one of them is, i guess, it's a real wedding and a real -- they're walking up the altar and there's music going off. >> oh, yes. >> that one is real, versus a set-up, base lick, a fake -- that disney setup at disney park, at walt disney park. >> yeah. i think it was supposed to be like security camera, you about it was totally set up. >> there are three, four
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cameras. and your antenna goes up. how many there are so many cameras. the couple is perfect, looks like a toothpaste commercial. >> perfect hair. >> it sets the high bar high. how does the company try to get that authentic feel for something that -- >> they're manufacturing, so v- >> you can be -- we all can be real. the problem that we have when we work with sponsors is convincing them to let it happen and you have to let go of control. you have let things happen. you don't have to put it online. in terms of letting things happen. go to a real wedding, see what you can capture. you guarantee there's something at a wedding. if you cast it with the perfect looking guy and perfect girl, and she's like, oh, my god -- >> we all have really good antenna to tell us when things are fake. one of the things in our book, in our viral video manifest stow
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be true. if you're true people pick that up. if you're not people pick that up as well. there's a new video. a drive through. he has a costume in a suit that looks like a car seat. he drives up and you have the camera sitting in the passenger seat, getting the reactions of the people -- oh, my god. there's no one in the car. classic candid úh camera type stuff. >> even letterman, when he would drop the -- >> yes, yes. that was real. >> and the dunkin' donuts? >> people send us thing. i saw it, it had 6,000, 7,000 views. i said this is good. this is what mcdonald's should be doing. sure enough. two weeks later -- penguin magic is the sponsor. it's a little magic company. he's been doing videos for them
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for a year or two. cool stunts like that. this is clearly the best one and in two weeks it got 30 million views like that. >> do you see a lot of companies tapping into social media and the conversation there to kind of give a more authentic feel to their videos? samsung, for example, had very successful viral videos. >> the one of people standing in line where the woman goes -- >> right. what they did for that. they used social analytic tools and we're monitoring what was said on social media. and used that in their campaign. >> i didn't know that. i knew they had an effective campaign. >> some of the phrases used were actually pulled from twitter, facebook, whatever. do you see companies doing that? >> we haven't seen that. we worked sort of in the lab making crazy exploding things. sticky notes, water falls. we haven't seen it but it's really smart. what happens there. they pulled some real stuff,
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people like we said, and put it in that context. >> you mention your lab, is there a pressure -- first of all, i want to visit that lab. second, is there pressure -- how many total videos have you served? you keep a running tally? >> it's been really hard to count. between the stuff that -- the views of our videos on tv, and boot leg copy, our guess is about 150 million or so of all of the stuff. >> is there tremendous pressure to come up with the next diet coke and mentos? >> there was a second one. there was ridiculous second novel kind of pressure. thank god they were successful with that one. >> they'll take an idea and comma sauj it. >> and /* we all go?
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>> absolutely. >> steven voltz has a new book out "viral video." four reals of viral video? >> viral video manifesto. >> fantastic. "press:here" will be back in just a minute.
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that's our show for this week. my thanks to our guests. i'm scott mcgrew, thank you for making us part of your sunday morning.
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championship! >> win the doschy. >> a stanley cup for los angeles. >> shaun white, boy does he
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deliver. >> washington, d.c., capital city of the country. six blocks away, verizon center, alex ovechkin captain of the capitals. perhaps the spark will be facing sidney crosby captain of the pittsburgh penguins. no penguin has more points than he. that's normal. two feisty teams coming off wins. caps/pens after this update. >> doc, thanks so much. time to hit up saturday night's highlights. first two weeks of the nhl season have been shark weeks. san jose 7-0-0, the only perfect team left in the league taking on nashville. san jose trailing 1-0 on the power play. a scoreless overtime. go to the shootout. craig smith, the only goal in the shootout.

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